Starting next Sunday, November 1, our Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club will delve into The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, which I wrote in 2019 as the first in the Hidden History series of 10 books.

One of the book’s biggest revelations is that the Second Amendment wasn’t written to protect hunters, homeowners, citizens resisting tyranny, or even the National Guard. The “militias” it speaks of as the necessary element to safety and security were the slave patrols, and it was Virginian (and the largest slaveholder in the state) Patrick Henry (who’s most famous and most ironic line was “Give me liberty or give me death!”) who demanded the Amendment, as parts of the state had far more enslaved Black people than free whites (as Henry pointed out in his famous speech when Virginia was debating ratifying the Constitution).

Over the five Sundays of November we’ll travel from Christopher Columbus’ slave business to the slave patrols across the Old South to the Klan, the Black Panthers, and Ronald Reagan’s “sudden” enthusiasm for gun control. Finally, we’ll expose the massive “fraud on the American public” (a quote from a conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice) that was the 2008 Heller decision that blatantly and cynically rewrote American history to “discover” a “right” that’s even, in its presentation and implementation, more of a right than our right to vote. Each week will be an excerpt from the book with a short commentary.

If you’ve ever wondered why America has the highest homicide rate in the developed world and more guns than people, this book is for you.

November’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book of the Month:

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Just a reminder that we’ll be discussing this book in a few hours (9AM PT/Noon ET). The link for paid subscribers to jump into our Zoom room is here.

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This past July, Medicare turned 61. Most Americans just think of it as the program that gave seniors inexpensive healthcare for the rest of their lives, but — unknown to most Americans — it was also the most successful racial integration program in the history of the United States. Sadly, the way that happened has been almost entirely scrubbed from our national memory.

As recently as 1964, Black Americans were routinely turned away from the majority of America’s hospitals. Even women in labor, even people bleeding from a car wreck, Black people were turned away, and on those rare occasions when they were admitted to a hospital they were segregated to wait in basement wards, sometimes for days, until all the white patients upstairs had been seen. The Louisiana Red Cross labeled its blood supply “White” and “Colored.”

Even though the Civil Rights Title VI outlawed this, the hospital industry ignored it. The American Hospital Association’s own magazine ran an article explaining that keeping the races apart “must be [a hospital’s] primary consideration.”

Enter a brilliant move by Lyndon Johnson and a handful of men at HEW and Social Security: they wrote the Medicare Act in a way that prevented even one dollar of Medicare funds to go to any hospital that wasn’t in compliance with the Civil Rights Act.

Then they tipped off Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the (Black) National Medical Association, who recruited hundreds of Black volunteers to fan out across the country and try to get into hospitals. When doctors and hospitals figured out what was happening, some of these people had crosses burned in their front yards or the lug nuts removed from their cars’ wheels.

But Johnson held firm and refused to pay them anything at all if there was any proof whatsoever they were still engaging in racial discrimination. And within an astounding 4 months, roughly 6,500 hospitals bent their knees and medicine went from being America’s most segregated institutions to its most integrated.

The chapter starts with what came before. There’s the American Medical Association hiring a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan to record an LP warning that Medicare was the first step to socialism, a record my dad played for our whole family. There’s LBJ explaining the AMA to George Meany with a story about chickens (you’ll see why I couldn’t paraphrase it). And there’s the day the AMA’s leadership walked into the Cabinet Room to fight Medicare and walked out having endorsed it on camera. It’s truly a hero’s journey story and deserves to be more well-known.

LBJ takes it to Reagan and the doctors

America took a somewhat different path.

On June 13, 1961 President John F. Kennedy gave a speech proposing what we today call Medicare. ““I do not know any problem or remedy more obvious which now faces the Congress of the United States,” Kennedy said, speaking of elderly Americans on fixed incomes without health insurance.

“Now, the program we suggested,” Kennedy said, “will provide that [the working person] will set aside during his working years an average of $13 a year, not a burden for anyone employed, $13 a year. And that man and woman will know when they are over 65 that they will never be a burden upon their children and never be a charity case upon the national government…”

It was a sweeping and classic Kennedy proposal, on the order of sending a man to the moon, that, four years later, President Johnson would remind Americans of as he used Kennedy’s memory to shame legislators into voting for Medicare.

“There isn’t a country in Western Europe that didn’t do what we are doing 50 years ago or 40 years ago,” Kennedy said. “We are not suggesting something radical and new or violent. We are not suggesting that the government come between the doctor and his patient. We are suggesting what every other major, developed, intelligent country did for its people a generation ago.”

He closed the speech with the simple challenge: “I think it is time the United States caught up.”¹¹² In response, the all-white American Medical Association hired B-movie actor Ronald Reagan to record a chilling warning, one that successfully defeated Kennedy’s initiative. Reagan cast the debate not as one about healthcare but as a battle between democracy and socialism, then the feared province of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.

“[T]his threat is with us,” Reagan warned in a grave voice, “and, at the moment, is more imminent” than any time in the past.

Embracing his version of Frederick Hoffman’s 1920s warnings about the dangers of the “Prussian way” of single-payer medicine, Reagan said, “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”

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Welcome!

It’s almost time for the October “Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club”live session with Thom Hartmann

The Details:

• Date: Sunday, October 25, 2026

• Time: 9 am PT / Noon ET

• Topic: A discussion on the book “American Healthcare” with Q&A

• Where: A Zoom room - with the details below on how to join

The LIVE Zoom call is open to paid subscribers to The Hartmann Report.

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You are invited to join Thom Hartmann LIVE for the October “Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club”

Mark the date:

• Date: Sunday, October 25, 2026

• Time: 9 am PT / Noon ET

• Topic: A discussion on the book “American Healthcare” with Q&A

• Where: A Zoom room - with the details in an email this Friday

About the Book

The Hidden History of American Healthcare by Thom Hartmann
Why sickness bankrupts you and makes others insanely rich

You can read excerpts from the book here.
Here is a link to the book on Amazon.

Join the Hartmann Report today to be able to access the live session and ask questions. As a paid subscriber, you can also comment on any article on the Hartmann Report.

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See you on Sunday!

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Last Sunday you met Frederick Hoffman, the Prudential statistician who spent his life “proving” that helping Black Americans by giving them access to free healthcare would only hasten their extinction. This week’s chapter is about what he and his colleagues did with that belief once real money was on the line.

When 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to hear President Teddy Roosevelt speak, he pitched a platform that included “social insurance” for all Americans that included comprehensive health coverage. By 1915 the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) was demanding that every state enact comprehensive, universal, government-funded health insurance. By 1916 eight states, New York and California among them, had taken up its model bill, which used government money to cover all medical costs and up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave. The American Medical Association had even endorsed it.

At the time, no major companies were offering health insurance but death insurance was Prudential’s cash cow, a product a small army of salesmen sold door-to-door nationwide. The healthcare plan Roosevelt and AALL and the AMA were pitching, however, had a small ($100) death benefit to cover funeral costs, and Hoffman used it to get Prudential into the act of killing that generation’s version of Medicare For All in the crib.

“We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance,” Hoffman wrote to his employers. He resigned from the AALL “in disgust” and became the face of a Prudential-funded campaign so fierce that one of the AALL’s founders wrote in 1918 that every piece of anti-insurance propaganda in the country, every flyer or leaflet “no matter who gives them to you,” traced back to “the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”

This chapter opens with a costume ball, which led to New York’s 1905 Armstrong Investigation nearly destroyed the insurance industry’s reputation. People were so cynical that Purdential’s executives knew their opposition to health insurance “would be perceived as brazen self-interest.” So they hired Hoffman, who presented himself as a scientist.

Read Hoffman’s pamphlets with today’s talking points in your ear. Health insurance is “made in Germany,” he wrote in 1917, as American boys were shipping out to fight the Kaiser. It “makes your citizen a subject.” It means “autocracy, paternalism and coercion.”

Virtually every line the trillion-dollar health insurance industry used against the public option in 2009 and against Medicare for All in 2020 was road-tested by Prudential a century earlier. And it worked.

In 1920 California’s voters killed health insurance at the ballot box, New York’s Assembly let it die in committee, and the AALL never got another bill in front of a legislature.

New York shakes up the insurance industry

Blame the plutocrats’ costume balls for the crisis in the insurance industry at the turn of the century, a crisis that led to blocking a national single-payer health insurance system.

In 1905, the legislature of the State of New York was provoked by a public outcry to investigate the life insurance business. The New York lawmakers authorized an investigative body led by State Senator William Armstrong, later known as the Armstrong Commission, which held 51 investigatory sessions leading to eight new laws to regulate the industry.

The event not only cemented the reputation of Armstrong, but also kicked off the political career of Charles Evans Hughes, propelling him to the governorship of New York, the Republican presidential nomination in 1916, and to the Chief Justiceship of the US Supreme Court in 1930.

And it was a costume ball that triggered much of the public outrage.

Eight years earlier, in February of 1897, New York billionaire (in today’s money) banker and attorney Bradley Martin and his wife Cornelia had thrown a costume ball at the Waldorf. They’d taken over the entire hotel booking every single room, as The New York Times reported, and “all outside windows are boarded up” to keep the riffraff from seeing in.⁶⁷

Mrs. Martin came dressed as Mary Stuart (wearing a necklace once owned by the Queen), her husband as the Sun King, Louis XIV. John Jacob Astor, who would die on the Titanic in 1912, was dressed as Henry of Navarre, while J.P. Morgan was Moliere.

Instead of a success, though, the party became a scandal; there was such ostentatious wealth on display that New York clergymen, progressive politicians and many of New York’s newspapers condemned the Martins.

“Some crank” sent a bomb to the Martin’s home, according to the Times, because of all the controversy. New York’s Police Commissioner told the Times, “The sensational articles that have recently appeared in two of the papers have started up these cranks to talking and writing against the Bradley Martins, and undoubtedly Mrs. Martin has been subjected to a great deal of annoyance from them.”⁶⁸

The Martins were so offended, humiliated and frightened by the response of the good citizens of New York that they bought the former home of “Diamond King” Barney Barnato, what the Times said was “the most pretentious [home] in London,” and moved to England.

Like the Roaring 20s and today’s late Reaganomics era, the Gilded Age was marked by obscene wealth and excess, contrasted with low wages and poverty for working people. Thus, when it was reported that James Hazen Hyde, son of the founder of The Equitable Life Assurance Society and a billionaire in today’s money, had not only held a Versaille-themed ball himself but put it on the tab of the company, New York exploded.

The Armstrong Commission investigation was the result of the tipping point these two events hit, and it reflected so badly on Hyde that, like Martin, he fled the country, going to live in France.

The Armstrong Commission also found widespread evidence of bribery, or at least inappropriate influence, of politicians by insurance industry executives, and recommended laws barring any employee of that industry from giving money to any politician, a harbinger of the Tillman Act of 1907, which banned corporate money contributions to federal candidates.

The scandals uncovered by Armstrong also fed a growing movement to provide every New Yorker with health insurance provided by nonprofit mutual companies and paid for by the state and the employers.

And Frederick Hoffman would help put a stop to it.

From Scientific Racism to “No Compulsory Healthcare!”

The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20^th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor’s visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.

But workers wanted both.

The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL). Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workman’s compensation insurance, child labor laws and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to lay out everything from his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer. Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts.

A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself – and was, in a very real way – a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.

A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’ 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.⁶⁹

Rodgers writes, “On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. … Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers – more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”

Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being considered or adopted in Europe).

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo) and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.” Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and over 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the Party.⁷⁰

Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance” including health coverage both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.

What finally blew up Hoffman’s support of the AALL apparently had to do with a system of insurance that had started in the late 17^th century in the UK to cover fire losses and had gradually grown to include other forms of protection.

It was called “mutual insurance” and was unique from Prudential’s model in that the companies were owned by their policyholders, instead of traditional corporate stockholders.

In this regard, mutual insurance ran much like employee-owned co-ops, and lived in the nonprofit world both practically and philosophically. They also had lower operating costs, as they didn’t have to shovel wheelbarrows of cash to their stockholders and senior executives.

America had a tradition of mutual insurance that started in 1752 with a company known as “The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses From Loss by Fire.” Its founder was Benjamin Franklin and it still exists; the idea of mutual property and casualty insurance companies grew from there across the states and around the world.⁷¹

In 1916, AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also cover a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.

Hoffman wrote to the company that, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.”⁷² He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop nonprofit, state-funded health insurance.

Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: The Insurance Federation of New York told their members, “This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds including fire.”⁷³

AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation also called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.

Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.

Prudential helps kill America’s first healthcare for all campaign

Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916-1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the Kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.

Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) writes, “Because of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen selfinterest.”⁷⁴

They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multi-year effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. And, at that, he was remarkably effective.

In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL and 1920 when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted. And his work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”⁷⁵

His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance and a subsequent “More Facts…” published two years later were his most widely cited and most consequential. Historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation) notes that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics. Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from ‘Misleading Data on German Longevity’ to ‘Misleading Estimate of Cost’ and ‘Disregard of Actuarial Methods.’”

Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Hoffman wrote, “The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance]…”⁷⁶

Lawmakers and the public, Hoffman wrote as America was fighting Germany during WWI, were supporting state-funded health insurance “which is unnecessary, and as essentially a product ‘made in Germany’ as any legislative panacea brought forward for the alleged good of the people during a generation or more. The propaganda had its origin in the program laid down by the International Association for Labor

Legislation, which held its first meeting in Baste, Switzerland…”⁷⁷

“The proposed legislation,” Hoffman wrote, “strikes one more blow at self-dependence and initiative and makes your citizen a subject, whether of king or of commission matters little. Self-dependence and initiative, virtues only permitted to a few favored individuals in older forms of government, are again to be taken away from a large number of citizens, in return for a mess of pottage, and the normal cycle of human stupidity becomes obvious. The Constitution promised liberty and happiness, not supervision and comfort; that is, the guarantees were moral, not material.”

Citing a 1917 report from the New Jersey Commission on Old Age, Insurance and Pensions, Hoffman wrote, “Under any and every system of social insurance the development of autocratic and arbitrary methods of interference with personal rights and liberties is a foregone conclusion.”

Quoting the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hoffman wrote, “[T]he State should concentrate its efforts on preventive work rather than on the attempt to cure diseases through insurance; in that the Workmen’s Compensation Act had already taken some of the liberties away from the individual wage-earner, and that health insurance would take more; that the tendency of health insurance would be to pauperize the workers; that health insurance was not suited to American needs; that health insurance abroad was economically unsuccessful; that its cost was prohibitive; that it was an encouragement of malingering, and that selfrespecting labor did not desire it.”⁷⁸

Toward the end of the pamphlet, once again warning of the dangers to America of adopting anything resembling Bismark’s single-payer national health insurance system, Hoffman summarized:

“The German experiment in paternalism and coercion sounds the most convincing note of warning to other industrial countries, where under free institutions, under conditions of voluntary service, savings and self-sacrifice, infinitely better and more lasting results have been achieved.

“It is devoutly to be hoped that the warning will be heeded by the American people and that they will develop a strong and thoroughly effective opposition to any and every tendency towards autocracy, paternalism and coercion, under the plea of Social Insurance as inherently hostile and fatal to our traditional conceptions of personal and political liberty in a democracy.”⁷⁹

Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.

In 1918, John R. Commons – one of the AALL’s cofounders – wrote that most all the nation’s anticompulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”⁸⁰

Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings, to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system that had gone into effect in 1911.

He wrote from London, in a widely-read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”⁸¹

Historian Beatrix Hoffman notes, “His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. … His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”

In 1920, in large part because of the Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.

While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.

Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that blacks would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).

In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible…for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation,” and that blacks moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”⁸² Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” that those paid by whites.⁸³

What died in 1920 wasn’t just a bill; it was a century of Americans dying or going bankrupt for lack of access to healthcare. The AALL model law covered everybody, paid every medical bill, gave workers half a year of paid sick leave, and had America’s official doctors’ association on board.

Had it passed in New York and California, the other states would have followed the way they later followed on workers’ compensation and the way Medicare for All spread from Saskatchewan in Canada to every other province within a decade.

Instead we have half a million medical bankruptcies a year, a life expectancy that trails every peer nation, and senior executives in a predatory insurance industry who literally make hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars in personal wealth each.

Perhaps most astounding it took until 1984, eighty-eight years after Race Traits was published and thirty-eight years after Hoffman died, for Prudential to stop charging Black customers premiums a third higher than white customers paid.

When a for-profit industry can’t convince Americans (or politicians) on the merits, it buys a credentialed voice and floods the state capitols and DC. In 1917 it was Hoffman’s pamphlets; in 2009 it was the talking points that a CIGNA executive named Wendell Potter wrote for the industry’s trade group before his conscience made him quit (his story is in the book too).

This year, it’s the “think tanks” and Trump and Dr. Oz telling you the privatized, for-profit Medicare Advantage scam saves money.

Next Sunday I’ll tell you how, in 1966, just one single federal program integrated nearly every hospital in America in four months, without a court order or a federal police force.

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When you ask most Americans why we’re the only developed nation on Earth without a national healthcare system that covers everybody at low cost, saves trillions, and saves hundreds of thousands of people from unnecessary death and disability every year, most will tell you about the AMA, the insurance lobby, or Reagan.

And, indeed, they’re all part of the story. But the deeper answer, one I discovered — to my shock — when I was writing this book, is that it’s almost all because of a guy nobody in modern America has every heard of.

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman stepped off a boat in New York in 1884 with $4.76 in his pocket and not a word of English. By 1920 he was a vice president of Prudential, one of the most powerful and respected statisticians in the country, and America’s leading authority on the pseudoscience used to justify Jim Crow that was then called “scientific racism.” He was also, as you’ll read next Sunday, the single most effective opponent of universal health insurance this nation has ever produced.

What makes Hoffman so unsettling is that he wasn’t a crank. He published the first work anywhere in the world linking tobacco to lung cancer, documented the connection between asbestos and the mesothelioma that killed my father, and helped create what became both the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association.

He was brilliant when it came to numbers, and could read a mortality table better than almost anyone alive. And in 1896 he put that skill to work on a 300-page book that I tracked down in an antiquarian book store titled: Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. In that book, he purported to “prove” that Black Americans were headed for extinction because of their racial inferiority, and that any attempt by white society or government to help them — healthcare above all — would only speed up the process while dragging white people down with it.

This chapter follows Hoffman from the Georgia obstetrician’s pamphlet that gave him the idea, through the statistical case he built for it, to the arguments he left behind. “Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” he wrote. When David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on the proposition that government help hurts the people it’s meant to help, he was simply reciting Hoffman with the racial vocabulary filed off.

A warning before you begin reading: I quote Hoffman at length, and his language is the language of white supremacy. I left it intact because I want you to see exactly what the founding intellectual of American healthcare opposition believed, in his own words. That thread runs straight from his book to your Republican congressman’s talking points.

America, the Land of the Sick

America is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right, the only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare, and the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, continuously enslaved and legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

Prior to the “Trump Depression,” roughly 60 percent of Americans would have to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1000 expense⁵⁹; the number now is probably closer to 80% of Americans who can’t handle such a hit and is higher still for minority communities. Yet copays and deductibles when a person gets sick averaged $1318.00 in 2015 when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans, up from $548 just ten years earlier.⁶⁰ This strikes minorities particularly hard , which, it turns out, is not an accident.

The simple fact is that were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 30 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.

At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system – or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans – was Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Insurance Company that promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman Makes a Discovery

Racism is the main reason America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, as does every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get. And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post-Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man most Americans have never heard of.

In 1884 nineteen-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing 5’ 7” and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English,” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”⁶¹

From this humble beginning, Hoffman would become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.

He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920, he was an American citizen, Vice President of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.

In 1908 his article The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades, published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.

From this, he became Vice President of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the association between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).

In 1913 Hoffman wrote a seminal paper on the relationship between workplace pollution and cancer, which led him to cofound The American Society for the Control of Cancer (known today as the American Cancer Society). In 1937, he extended his research beyond the workplace and published Cancer and Diet, a book correctly pointing out the correlation between poor nutrition and cancer that is still in print at a dense 767 pages, mostly of statistical analysis between dietary habits and rates of disease.

His cancer research was so extensive and detailed (he concluded that diets heavy in processed foods and animal products produced higher cancer rates) that Adelle Davis – whose books became my mother’s nutrition guru in the 1950s and ‘60s – became an early “convert” and “a devotee of Frederick Hoffman.”⁶² But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.

On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a pamphlet by Dr. Eugene R Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled Vital Equation of the Negro. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.⁶³

This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether blacks would soon outnumber whites in that part of the country. The Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of black people claimed that blacks were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmet Till (among others).

However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking the protective womb of slavery, would die out for the simple reason that the black race was inferior to whites.

Corson acknowledged the Klan’s argument that, “The simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, whites would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s “Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.”⁶⁴ While blacks may have more children, Corson wrote, whites would still outnumber them because black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.” Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which he is not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, the Negro “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race…”

The discovery of this theory, called the “racial extinction thesis,” electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that may prevent or slow down the extinction of black people in America.

Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro

In August of 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s opus magnum, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for black people “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”⁶⁵

In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but to prove that any time white people tried to help black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.

Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman writes, “he is in the South as a permanent factor…with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections…and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”⁶⁶

In great detail, Hoffman spends about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, that blacks were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.

And it was all because of their race.

“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. … This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration…sexual immorality…diminished social and economic efficiency…” And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.

The participation of freed blacks in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”

Slavery had actually been good for black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote,” than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”

But with abolition, former slaves were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”

While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos or carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”

But at the time, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries when he wrote:

“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”

And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral.

“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. … The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”

To those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman (and his colleagues, including the Prudential Insurance Company) had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.

From Scientific Racism to Libertarianism

In 1980, David Koch famously ran for Vice President of the United States on the banner of the

Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.

In this, Koch and his libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.

In his 1896 Race Traits book, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor and legal violence, but it was scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.

White people and government programs to better the lives of black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position…” The damage done to black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”

Hoffman points to Native Americans to prove his point. “Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. … An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”

But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that had destroyed the American Indian.

It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity. “The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”

White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: Only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate it weakens the overall human race.

“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concludes, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”

And it’s not just charity. “All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy and religion have failed to develop [among blacks] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.

“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”

Free education – as any Libertarian can tell you – is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.

Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote, “Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.” And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed these were eternal truths independent of race.

“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. …[I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance … must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”

This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.

Notice how Hoffman handled his numbers here, using real Black mortality data. The fact is that Black Americans in 1896 did die younger and more often of tuberculosis, malaria, and childbirth.

What Hoffman pulled off here, though, blinded by his own racism, was to strip out the obvious cause for all that suffering — three centuries of slavery followed by thirty years of poverty, Jim Crow, and hospitals that turned Black patients away — and attribute it instead to a simplistic argument for “race inferiority.”

That one widely-believed-in-his-day move of blaming the struggles and pain of the victims of American racism on themselves is also at the core of the libertarian/GOP case against healthcare. When you hear Republican politicians and on-the-take Democrats argue that uninsured people have “chosen” not to have coverage, that Medicaid recipients need “skin in the game,” or that expanding healthcare coverage “creates dependency,” you’re hearing echoes of the words of the long-dead Frederick Hoffman.

Next Sunday I’ll move from healthcare (and race) theory to the literally trillions of dollars involved. Prudential Insurance Company made Hoffman a VP and put him on the road, speaking to legislatures, physicians groups, and Congress between 1916 and 1920. Through those well-paid efforts he personally helped kill — repeatedly — what would have been America’s first healthcare-for-all program. And, ironically, all this was going down just three decades after Germany built the world’s first successful single-payer system in 1886.

If you know a young person who’s heard the Republican mantra that “welfare makes people dependent,” send them this chapter.

And join us for a discussion of the book and the situation with American healthcare on the last Sunday of October at 9 am PT, noon ET.

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Over the course of the five Sundays this month, I’ll be publishing here chapter-length excerpts from my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare with a few words up front about the chapter and its context in the larger book.

Each of the chapters I’m publishing references fights we’re taking on this fall, starting with the Medicare Advantage scam, which you’ll be hearing about on TV because open enrollment begins on October 15 and they’re already advertising.

When I wrote this book in the fall of 2020, about a third of the people who thought they were on Medicare were actually on privatized Medicare Advantage plans. Today it’s 55 percent, more than 35 million people, and some surveys suggest most all of them think they’re actually on Medicare. This is one of the GOP’s most successful bait-and-switch campaigns in American history.

Congress’s own nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission tells us that the federal government is now paying those private plans around 14 percent more per person this year than it would spend if those same people had been enrolled in traditional Medicare. That’s an extra $76 billion in 2026 alone, and every penny of it is going to the fatcats in the health insurance industry.

And the company at the center of this chapter, UnitedHealth — still has grabbed 26 percent of all Medicare Advantage enrollment mostly through their deal with AARP — is now the subject of criminal and civil Justice Department investigations into the “upcoding” practices you’re about to read about. The company put it this way in a securities filing on July 24, 2025:

“The Company has now begun complying with formal criminal and civil requests from the Department.”

This chapter tells three stories. There’s the physician-turned-CEO nicknamed “Dollar Bill” who walked away from UnitedHealth with more than a billion dollars.

There’s the 2003 law that created “risk adjustment,” which lets insurance companies send a nurse to your home to look for ways to raise their payments from the feds without having to provide any additional services. (Yeah, it’s as grim as it sounds.)

And there’s a friend of mine I call Sam, who signed up for a “free” Advantage plan at an urgent care clinic, got a cancer diagnosis, and discovered that the best cancer center in New York wouldn’t take his insurance. To add injury to insult, he couldn’t get back into real Medicare without a Medigap policy that the insurers — because he’d been off real Medicare for more than 12 months — were now free to deny him.

The text below is as it appeared in the book published in 2021, so the figures in it are from that period. Where they’ve changed since, they’ve gotten worse.

“Dollar Bill” McGuire and the Privatization of Medicare

A billion dollars is a mind-bending amount of money. It’s a million dollars a thousand times—more money than any human being could possibly need to live a full and satisfying life, and enough to ensure that children, grandchildren, and generations to come will never, ever have to work. It’s dynastic money.

Yet that’s what you can make in healthcare in America if you’re willing to say to sick people, “No, I won’t pay for that surgery or medication even though it may save your life.”

“‘Dollar Bill’ has made lots of news with cash-and-stock paydays that have topped $100 million in recent years—and he’s still sitting atop stock options valued at $1.6 billion,” wrote Neal St. Anthony in 2007 for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the largest newspaper in UnitedHealth’s home state of Minnesota.^[i]

“Dollar Bill” was Bill McGuire, then the CEO of UnitedHealth, the nation’s largest health insurance operation. And although trained as a physician, McGuire didn’t make his money healing anybody.

On the contrary, he made that money by aggressively enforcing the fine print in his company’s contracts with people who’d bought health insurance from UnitedHealth, particularly that fine print that talked about preexisting conditions, lifetime caps, not paying “out-of-network expenses,” and requiring doctors and hospitals to jump through a never-ending series of exhausting hoops to get “authorization” to treat sick people.

Not to mention his (and his senior executives’) manipulation of stock options; after all, if you’re going to run a grift on your customers, why not do the same to your shareholders?

The Wall Street Journal pointed out in March 2006 that McGuire had backdated some of his stock options, increasing his income by hundreds of millions in what the Journal called “one of the most lucrative stock-option grants ever.”^[ii]

The Securities and Exchange Commission later agreed, and as Reuters reported the following year, McGuire had to “forfeit more than $400 million in stock options and other compensation and pay a $7 million fine to settle an investigation into the health insurer’s options practices.”^[iii]

In 2003, President George W. Bush and his congressional Republicans gave UnitedHealth a huge gift (which good-government advocates would argue was in exchange for massive lobbying and campaign contributions, so it was more of a quid pro quo). They carved a hole in Medicare, the government healthcare payment system for people over 65, and let private for-profit health insurance companies fill it.

This semi-privatization of Medicare was called Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage. Although it has the name “Medicare,” it’s not Medicare. It’s private, for-profit insurance, with almost all of the costs paid for with funds extracted from the government’s Medicare trust fund.

While Dollar Bill left UnitedHealth in 2006 with his billion-plus dollars (and a trail of dead and dying customers), the company jumped into Medicare Advantage with the same gusto for making money as it had under McGuire’s stewardship.

The headline from Kaiser Health News, the gold standard publication for reporting on the healthcare industry in America, says it all: “UnitedHealth Doctored Medicare Records, Overbilled U.S. by $1 Billion, Feds Claim.”^[iv]

In a massive fraud reminiscent of Republican Senator Rick Scott’s 1990s tenure as CEO of Columbia/HCA, the hospital group that had to pay the government $1.7 billion for Scott’s company’s Medicare fraud,^[v] UnitedHealth ripped off America in a way that could only be described as breathtaking. Or at least second only to Rick Scott.

“In a 79-page lawsuit filed in Los Angeles,” Kaiser Health News reported, “the Justice Department alleged that the insurer made patients appear sicker than they were in order to collect higher Medicare payments than it deserved. The government said it had ‘conservatively estimated’ that the company ‘knowingly and improperly avoided repaying Medicare’ for more than a billion dollars over the course of the decade-long scheme.”^[vi]

The “Advantage” War against Medicare

Medicare Advantage is a massive, trillion-dollar rip-off, of the federal government and of taxpayers, and of many of the people buying the so-called Advantage plans.

It’s also one of the most effective ways that insurance companies could try to kill Medicare for All, since about a third of all people who think they’re on Medicare are actually on these privatized plans instead.

Nearly from its beginning, Medicare has allowed private companies to offer plans that essentially compete with it, but they were an obscure corner of the market and didn’t really take off until the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress rolled out the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. This was the big chance for the GOP (and a few corporatist Democrats) to finally privatize Medicare, albeit one bite at a time.

That law created a brand known as Medicare Advantage under the Medicare Part C provision, and a year later it phased in what are known as risk-adjusted large-batch payments to insurance companies offering Advantage plans.

Medicare Advantage plans are not Medicare. They’re private health insurance most often offered by the big for-profit insurance companies (although some nonprofits participate, particularly the larger HMOs), and the rules they must live by are considerably looser than those for Medicare.

Even more consequential, they don’t get reimbursed directly on a person-by-person, procedure-by-procedure basis. Instead, every year, Advantage providers submit a summary to the federal government of the aggregate risk score of all their customers and, practically speaking, are paid in a massive lump sum.

The higher their risk score, the larger the payment. A plan with mostly very ill people in it will get much larger reimbursements than a plan with mostly healthy people. After all, the former will be costly to keep alive and healthy, while the latter won’t cost much at all.

Profit-seeking insurance companies, being the predators that they are, have found a number of ways to raise their risk scores without raising their expenses. The classical strategies of tying people to in-network providers, denying procedures routinely during first-pass authorization attempts, and having very high out-of-pocket caps are carried over from regular health insurance systems to keep costs low and profits high.

But with Medicare Advantage, the big insurance companies have invented a whole new way to rip us all off while padding their bottom lines.

For example, many Medicare Advantage plans promote an annual home visit by a nurse or physician’s assistant as a “benefit” of the plan. What the companies are doing, though, is trying to upcode their customers to make them seem sicker than they are to increase their overall Medicare reimbursement risk score.

“Heart failure,” for example, can be a severe and expensive condition to treat . . . or a barely perceptible tic on an EKG that represents little or no threat to a person for years or even decades. Depression is similarly variable; if it lasts less than two weeks, there’s no reimbursement; if it lasts longer than two weeks, it’s called a “major depressive episode” and rapidly jacks up a risk score.

The home health visits are designed more to look for illnesses or codings that can increase risk scores than to find conditions that require medical intervention. They’re so profitable that an entire industry has sprung up of companies that send nurses out on behalf of the smaller insurance companies.

In summer 2014, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published an in-depth investigative report titled Why Medicare Advantage Costs Taxpayers Billions More Than It Should.^[vii]

They found, among other things, that one of the most common scams companies were running involved that very scoring of their customers as being sicker than they actually were, so that their reimbursements were way above the cost of caring for those people.

Here are a few quotes from the report:

• “Risk scores of Medicare Advantage patients rose sharply in plans in at least 1,000 counties nationwide between 2007 and 2011, boosting taxpayer costs by more than $36 billion over estimated costs for caring for patients in standard Medicare.”

• “In more than 200 of these counties, the cost of some Medicare Advantage plans was at least 25 percent higher than the cost of providing standard Medicare coverage.”

• The report documents how risk scores rose twice as fast for people who joined a Medicare Advantage health plan as for those who didn’t.

• Patients, the report lays out, never know how their health is rated because neither the health plan nor Medicare shares risk scores with them—and the process itself is so arcane and secretive that it remains unfathomable to many health professionals.

• “By 2009, government officials were estimating that just over 15 percent of total Medicare Advantage payments were inaccurate, about $12 billion that year.”

• Based on its own sampling of data from health plans, the report shows how CMS has estimated that faulty risk scores triggered nearly $70 billion in what officials deemed “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through 2013.

• CMS decided, according to the report, not to chase after overcharges from 2008 through 2010 even though the agency estimated through sampling that it had made more than $32 billion in “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans over those three years. CMS did not explain its reasoning.

• The report documents how Medicare expected to pay the health plans more than $150 billion in 2014, the year the study was published.^[viii]

Companies are almost never nailed for these overcharges, and when they are, they usually pay back pennies on the dollar.

For example, when the Office of Inspector General, Health and Human Services (which oversees Medicare), audited six out of the hundreds of plans on the market in 2007, they found that just those six companies “had been overpaid by an estimated $650 million” for that one year. As the Center for Public Integrity states, “CMS settled five of the six audits for a total repayment of just over $1.3 million.”^[ix]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also, in 2012, decided to audit only 30 plans a year going forward. As CPI noted, “At that rate, it would take CMS more than 15 years to review the hundreds of Medicare Advantage contracts now in force.” And that’s 15 years to audit just one year’s activity!

Things haven’t improved since that 2014 investigative report from CPI. In September 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and five Democratic colleagues sent a letter to President Donald Trump’s CMS administrator, Seema Verma.

“The recent HHS Payment Accuracy Report exposes that taxpayers have overpaid Medicare Advantage plans more than $30 billion . . . over the last three years,” Brown wrote. “This report comes on the heels of a 2016 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report and a 2013 GAO report on [Medicare Advantage] plan overcharges and the failure of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) to recoup billions of dollars of improper payments from MA plans.”^[x]

Meanwhile, during the four years of the Trump administration, CMS went out of their way to illegally promote Medicare Advantage plans (which typically cost CMS far more than a regular Medicare plan).

A February 2020 report in the New York Times stated, “Under President Trump, some critics contend, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, has become a cheerleader for Advantage plans at the expense of original Medicare.”^[xi]

The report pointed to the draft release of the 2019 Medicare & You handbook, which is mailed every year to all enrollees and posted online. “Advocates and some lawmakers criticized language describing Advantage as a less expensive alternative to original Medicare.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) compared Medicare Advantage with traditional Medicare and found the Advantage programs to be mind-bogglingly profitable: “MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending for enrollees in MA is 25 percent lower than for enrollees in [traditional Medicare] in the same county and [with the same] risk score.”

At the same time, Medicare Advantage often screws its customers. According to the NBER study, people with Medicare Advantage got 15 percent fewer colon cancer screening tests, 24 percent fewer diagnostic tests, and 38 percent fewer flu shots.^[xii]

Speculation is rife as to why CMS would allow—much less promote—privatized plans that cost Medicare far more than original Medicare to rip off taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars a month.

One possibility is regulatory capture—people working in CMS know that if they go along and get along, very well-paid jobs are waiting for them at for-profit insurance companies after a few years of government service. This is a chronic problem at other regulatory agencies, particularly those overseeing pollution, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and banking.

Another answer is that the Bush administration—where Medicare Advantage started—was so enamored of the idea of privatizing Medicare to eventually destroy the program (George W. Bush campaigned extensively from the late 1970s through his presidency to privatize both Social Security and Medicare) that they turned a blind eye to abuses.

The Obama administration had other priorities, as they were trying to push through the Affordable Care Act and didn’t want to upset the apple cart. And when Trump came into power, his folks saw anything that drained resources out of Medicare and into the pockets of multimillionaire health insurance executives—a group notoriously generous when it comes to making political contributions—as a plus.

You Are Locked-in to Medicare Advantage

A fellow I’d known decades ago recently bubbled back into conversation among a few of us who’d hung out together in New York back in the 1970s. Sam, I’ll call him, had turned 65 and hadn’t had employer-provided health insurance in years. He spent a few hours trying to figure out how to sign up for Medicare and then gave up, totally confused, decided he’d try again in a few months.

Unfortunately, his prostate intervened. When Sam started experiencing pain urinating, he visited a local “doc in a box” urgent care clinic, where they gave him a PSA test. The result was shocking: his PSA was so high that it was a virtual certainty he had prostate cancer, and possibly it had even metastasized, a situation that is the second-leading cause of cancer death in American men.^[xiii]

Telling him that he’d be facing hefty doctor and hospital bills regardless of the outcome, the urgent care clinic signed him up for a Medicare Advantage plan offered by an affiliate that almost certainly paid them a commission for the sign-up. Sam was excited, though, because he now had insurance, and it was a “no dollar” plan that didn’t cost him a penny.

Sam then got on the phone to find a urologist who specialized in cancer. He found that the best worked out of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and, telling them he was “on Medicare,” he made an appointment to see one of their top docs. A month later, when his appointment finally opened up, the person who was checking him into the system told him that he’d have to pay cash because his Advantage plan didn’t include Sloan Kettering.

In fact, more than a third of all Medicare Advantage plans nationwide do not include any of the National Cancer Institute centers, and none of the Advantage plans offered in the New York City area include the nation’s most famous one, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.^[xiv]

Shocked, Sam contacted Medicare to see if he could transfer from Medicare Advantage to regular Medicare. This all happened in fall 2020, so they told him that he could make the change during the “open enrollment period” of October 15 to December 7. He made the change and called Sloan Kettering back.

This time, they wanted to know what Medigap policy he’d signed up for to fill in the 20 percent of billing that Medicare doesn’t cover. That sent Sam back to the internet and, ultimately, to an insurance agent, who told him that while Medigap plans can’t refuse you because of preexisting conditions when you first sign up when you turn 65, if you shift from Medicare Advantage back to traditional Medicare after that first enrollment, particularly if you’re older or sick, they can simply refuse to cover you.

Reporter Mark Miller wrote for the New York Times in February 2020 about Ed Stein, a 72-year-old man with bladder cancer and a Medicare Advantage plan that didn’t cover the cancer docs in his area who specialized in his type of cancer. He tried to shift back to traditional Medicare to cover what promised to be complex and expensive surgery and chemotherapy. As Miller wrote, “That was when he ran up against one of the least understood implications of selecting Advantage when you enroll in Medicare: The decision is effectively irrevocable.”^[xv]

As of this writing (November 2020)[ER7] [TCH8] , my friend Sam still hadn’t seen a doctor. This is the state of healthcare in America as it’s been sliced and diced by the multibillion-dollar insurance industry.

Meanwhile, every fall, Americans are inundated with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of TV, direct mail, and internet advertising for Medicare Advantage plans. And where does the money come from to pay for that advertising?

It comes from the same place that provided over $1 billion in personal income to the former CEO of United Healthcare and over $100 million a month in compensation to senior executives in the largest health insurance companies: denying claims while collecting risk adjustment claims from your tax dollars and mine.

The simple solution to the Medicare Advantage problem is to kill off the program. It was just a Trojan horse to privatize Medicare, and its presence will make Medicare for All even harder to implement. At the same time, the 20 percent hole that the GOP insisted on for skin in the game with real Medicare needs to go, too.

A comprehensive Medicare for All program would eliminate both of these problems.

I wrote this book before Medicare Advantage had grabbed the more-than-half of Americans they now “serve” and the risk scores are still secret while the infrequent audits rarely get more than pennies on the dollar. While Republicans scream about the cost of Medicare For All or even traditional Medicare, the $76 billion in overpayments our tax dollars will make to these insurance giants will let their CEOs buy new yachts and Swiss chalets.

So if you’re on Medicare or about to be, please read the fine print on anything that has the word “Advantage” attached to it. And you may want to ask your politicians why if Medicare Advantage is about saving money and “choice” we’re paying 14 percent more for it than real Medicare, just to feather the nests of health insurance billionaires.

Next Sunday we go back to a pivotal year, 1896, to meet the man who convinced America that helping sick people was scientifically wrong if they’re Black.

We’re going to meet this morning via Zoom instead of using the Substack app, as Nigel isn’t available to moderate the conversation for the book club. So, here’s your invitation to the meeting. See you at 9 AM PT/Noon ET today (in an hour or so)!

Thom Hartmann is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Thom Hartmann’s Book Club Meeting

Time: Sep 27, 2026 09:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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PART FOUR. Stood Up Straight Before God (Chapters 22 through 28)

The final quarter of Looking Backward is where Bellamy makes his economic case, preaches his sermon, and lays out his ending and its suggestions for the future.

Keep in mind, the book begins — and was written — in 1887, and is entirely speculating about what life in our country will be like in the year 2000. It became the foundation and inspiration for most of the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If you only read one section closely before we meet, make it this one.

Chapter 22 answers the question “Where does all the money come from to run the 2020 American economy?” Leete notes that there’s no longer any national debt, no “idle rich” people, no “army of men employed in finance,” and thus no meaningful criminal class.

He says that the four greatest mistakes of the 19th century had been the result of unrestrained and unregulated capitalism that produced both idle capital and labor as well as periodic financial crises. Any one of them, he says, “would suffice to make the difference between wealth and poverty on the part of a nation.”

His description of the way companies try to monopolize markets could have come from this week’s Financial Times:

“The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. This, Mr. West, is what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing production.”

On credit, which he calls “the sign of a sign,” Bellamy writes that nineteenth century businessmen “were in the plight of a man building a house with dynamite for mortar.” Anyone who lived through Bush’s housing crash in 2008 (and his absolute refusal to hold even one single billionaire banker to account) will instantly recognize the situation.

And Leete’s summary of the whole system is one of the sharpest lines in the book: “Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide.”

Chapters 23 through 25 turn to the personal and to women. West learns that women serve in their own branch of the industrial army with their own officers, that they are economically independent of husbands and fathers, and that motherhood, far from being penalized, is honored. Bellamy’s feminism is real but dated: it was still considered radical in 1887 when women couldn’t vote, hold an independent job, or sign a contract and was generally embraced by the suffrage movement.

Chapter 26 is the sermon. On Sunday the Leetes stay home and listen over something curiously similar to a radio to Mr. Barton, who preaches to huge national audiences (keep in mind, this book was published in 1887 and the first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air on November 2, 1920).

Barton’s subject is the moral transformation of humanity that brought us to this enlightened year 2000, and his explanation is that it wasn’t human nature that changed but, instead, the environment and culture of the nation.

A society “founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness” was, he says, replaced by one appealing “to the social and generous instincts of men.” He compares the old order of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the Black Hole of Calcutta, “where good men trampled each other for air,” and he insists the fault lay in the political and economic system, not in the people.

His parable of the rosebush planted in a swamp, blamed by generations of gardeners for failing to bloom until someone finally moved it to dry ground, is the moral center of the book. And his description of the change itself gives the novel its most famous sentence:

“The means of subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer to employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as among children at the father’s table.

“It was impossible for a man any longer to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem was the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him.

“There was no more either arrogance or servility in the relations of human beings to one another. For the first time since the creation every man stood up straight before God.”

Chapter 27 delivers the romance that’s necessary to any good novel. Edith Leete confesses that she’s the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, that she grew up reading West’s love letters, and that she had fallen in love with him before he ever woke. It’s sentimental, and Bellamy handles it well for the era, as it ties the two centuries together with a single thread of human feeling. It’s sweet.

Then comes Chapter 28, the finest writing in the book. West wakes in his underground chamber, Sawyer standing over him with a glass of sherry. It’s May 31, 1887, and he discovers that the whole thing was a dream.

He reads the morning paper, a catalogue of war scares, strikes, embezzlement, coal barons cutting production, an old couple in New Jersey killing themselves rather than enter the poorhouse, and at the bottom, “Professor Brown’s oration on the moral grandeur of nineteenth century civilization.”

He gets up, goes out, and walks through Boston with new eyes. Washington Street, with its ten thousand competing stores, makes him laugh out loud. The bank, which a director calls “the heart of the business system,” looks to him like “an abscess.” He ends in the South Cove tenements, seeing the poor not as creatures but as “my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of my flesh.”

That night, when he goes to dinner at the Bartletts, he tries to tell them about his dream:

“’I have been in Golgotha,’ at last I answered. ‘I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross! Do none of you know what sights the sun and stars look down on in this city, that you can think and talk of anything else?’”

(That phrase, humanity hanging from a cross, is another indicator of how influential this book by Bellamy was: William Jennings Bryant used it in his famous 1896 Cross of Gold speech, as did Dwight Eisenhower for his 1953 Chance for Peace speech.)

They call him a madman and a fanatic, and Edith’s father orders him thrown out, provoking the twist on the twist: he wakes up, sobbing, in Dr. Leete’s house in 2000. The twentieth century was real: the nightmare was 1887.

But even at that, Bellamy doesn’t let him off easy. West’s last thought is his shame, brought on by his knowledge of how society could be. He’d lived through the cruel years and done nothing, and now he’s “drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you stoned.”

That’s the question Bellamy leaves with every reader, and it’s the one I’d like us to start with when we meet today:

We’re the ones living in the years West thought would one day characterize a new and better, more egalitarian America. What happened, and what are we going to do now?

Next month we’ll be reading my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich. You can find it at most bookstores, online, and in most public libraries.

When doing the research for this book I encountered the most shocking story I’ve discovered in decades about how and why white supremacists have fought single-payer healthcare for over a century and why they forced LBJ to put a 20% hole into Medicare to discourage Black people from using the system.

If you can’t get one from a library and can’t afford to buy a copy, drop me a note by replying to this email and I have about a dozen copies here and can send you one, as long as my supply lasts. See you in a few hours!

Your Invitation

The second live session for members of Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club is on Sunday.

Join Thom Hartmann in a live session on Substack and share your thoughts on our September book of the month, Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887.

Time and Place

Day: Sunday, September 27
Time: Noon ET / 9am PT
Place: The Hartmann Report Substack (hartmannreport.com) and in the Substack app

How it Works

Thom Hartmann will be live to talk about the book and take your questions.

You can ask questions in the chat and, if you like, can be called into the ‘room’ where you will need your video and audio on.

To use chat or to be called into the room, you need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.

Nigel Peacock will be your moderator.

Thom will also announce the October Book of the Month.

To join in, subscribe now

Join the Book Club

This is the second live session for the book club using Substack, so we are still learning how it works. Should be fun!

See you there!

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PART THREE. A Society That Rests on Its Base (Chapters 15 through 21)

This is the part of the book where Bellamy stops dazzling Julian West with inventions and gadgets and starts filling in the civic machinery of America in the year 2000. Keep in mind, the book begins — and was written — in 1887, and is entirely speculating what life in our country will be like in the year 2000. It became the foundation and inspiration for most of the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Chapter 15, Leete takes West into his library and shows him that Dickens is the country’s favorite author, even years after his death, because he always cared about the fate of the poor. He lays out the economics of publishing books and newspapers (subscribers elect their editors!), and most of the system is what today we’d call reader-supported media.

From there, he lays out how American industry works. Management within companies and within the “industrial army” rise strictly on merit; the heads of the ten great “industrial departments” and the president of the United States are all chosen by workers, both currently employed and retired. To deal with corruption, most everything is taken out of the hands of politicians and put into the hands of career civil servants (the Pendleton Civil Service Act had only been passed in 1883, most likely around the time Bellamy was writing this book). The result is a government that runs on competence and the needs of average people rather than one that’s powered by campaign money.

In Chapter 19, West takes a walk through old Charlestown and notices that the old state prison has vanished. Leete explains that Americans finally figured out that the reason crime was a big deal in poor areas and relatively rare in upscale neighborhoods was because it was almost always driven by inequality. It was “fully nineteen twentieths of the crime” caused by that, so solving inequality became America’s biggest project.

“Want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do,” Bellamy writes. Remove the want and cap the accumulation of wealth, and, Leete told West, the crime withers “like Jonah’s gourd, in a day.”

Those who still insist on breaking the law are considered mentally ill and treated with “compassion and firm but gentle restraint.” The prisons are all gone, although there are secure mental hospitals. “’We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals.’”

“Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. … Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.”

That’s the basic argument of the whole book in one paragraph. Most law is simply the capitalist scaffolding that props up inequality. Take away the inequality and you take away the need for most of that scaffolding.

In Chapter 20, Edith takes West down to the excavated chamber where he slept for a century, and Bellamy lets the love story move forward. West is falling for her, and he can’t quite understand why she seems to know him so well. Hold onto that thread: it pays off in the final section.

Chapter 21 is all about the schools, and it may be the most quietly radical chapter in the book. Everyone is educated to age twenty-one, at public expense, and given “what you used to call the education of a gentleman.”

West asks about cost of going to school or college. “If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,” Leete says.

West suggests that education is wasted on the dull, and Leete answers that we mow lawns and plant gardens even though they yield nothing, because untended land is an eyesore to everyone around it, and the same is true of untended minds.

“If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we could give.”

Then he lays out the three rights on which the American system of the year 2000 rests:

“First, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.”

On schooling, Bellamy he was a century ahead of us, and we still haven’t caught up. Who in your community is being told they’re not worth educating?

The final quarter of Looking Backward that we’ll visit next Sunday is where Bellamy makes his economic case, preaches his sermon, and springs his ending. If you only read one section closely before we meet, make it this one.

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PART TWO. His Title Is His Humanity (Chapters 8 through 14)

Last week we left Julian West on Dr. Leete’s rooftop, demanding to know how a nation that employs everybody decides what and how to pay them. This week Bellamy answers with the most radical idea in the book.

First, though, West has to get out of the house.

Chapter 8 opens with him waking up the next morning, thinking for a blissful moment that he’s back in 1887, then remembering that he’s not. He walks the streets of 20th century Boston alone and comes back home badly shaken.

Washington Street has no stores. State Street has no banks. Freaking out, he asks Leete if the merchants and bankers had been, “Hung them all, perhaps, as the anarchists wanted to do in my day?”

Leete says no, that they simply became obsolete.

“There is neither selling nor buying nowadays.”

Every citizen, he explains, receives an equal annual credit on the public books and a card to draw against it at the public storehouses. Money has been kept as a word but abolished as a thing.

“The term, as we use it, answers to no real thing, but merely serves as an algebraical symbol for comparing the values of products with one another.”

Then West asks the question he’s been circling around ever since his first night awake in this new era: If everybody’s credit comes from the nation, what decides how much each person gets? Here’s how it plays out in the book:

“‘His title [to wealth and credit],’ replied Dr. Leete, is his humanity. The basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man.’

“‘The fact that he is a man!’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Do you possibly mean that all have the same share?’

“‘Most assuredly.’”

West sputters that some men do twice the work of others. Leete’s reply takes on the “conservative” and “libertarian” world views with a startling simplicity:

“The amount of the resulting product has nothing whatever to do with the question, which is one of desert. Desert is a moral question, and the amount of the product a material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The amount of the effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All men who do their best, do the same.”

When West protests that nobody will work hard without the carrot of money and the stick of hunger, Leete points out that nineteenth century America never believed that either.

When it wanted men to die for the country, he says, it didn’t offer higher wages: instead, it offered honor, duty, and the gratitude of their fellow citizens, “and never was there an age of the world when those motives did not call out what is best and noblest in men.”

The industrial army of 2000 runs on rank, badges, public recognition, and the simple fact that “diligence in the national service is the sole and certain way to public repute, social distinction, and official power.”

Edith Leete then takes West shopping, and Bellamy has some fun. The store is a single great hall with samples of everything, no salesmen pushing anything, and your orders are shot by pneumatic tube to a central warehouse and delivered to your home within the hour.

Shades of ordering groceries online, or listening to streaming music: in Chapter 11 Edith leads West into her home’s “music room,” where live performances from acoustically prepared halls are piped by wire into every home, and she can choose from a printed program what she’d like to hear.

Keep in mind, Bellamy imagined this in 1888, before anyone had built a radio. He also imagined the credit card.

Chapter 12 goes deeper into how the industrial army grades and promotes its workers, and then into what happens to people who can’t work at all. West assumes the sick and disabled are objects of charity, a sentiment against which Leete nearly explodes.

“’Who is capable of self-support?’ he demanded. ‘There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support becomes impossible.’”

Every worker, Leete argues, inherits the accumulated knowledge and machinery of the whole human past, which accounts for “nine parts to one” of what he produces. The disabled are co-heirs to that inheritance.

“Did you not rob them when you put them off with crusts, who were entitled to sit with the heirs, and did you not add insult to robbery when you called the crusts charity?”

The section closes, in Chapter 14, with rain, as the Leetes take him out to dinner without umbrellas, because the whole sidewalk has been roofed over.

Leete remarks that in the nineteenth century, when it rained, Boston “put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.”

At the public dining house, West is startled to see an educated young man waiting tables without shame. The word “menial,” Edith tells him, is obsolete.

Leete explains that “to accept a service from another which we would be unwilling to return in kind, if need were, is like borrowing with the intention of not repaying,” and that a system dividing people into classes “weakens the sense of a common humanity.”

Next week our tour of the book continues into newspapers, elections, crime, and the schools. But for now, let’s consider Leete’s question: Who among us is actually self-supporting? And what would our politics look like if we answered that question honestly?

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It’s not often that you encounter a book that can flip your entire view of the world on its side, which is why I’m taking a moment to share this incredible work by an old friend with you.

A physicist by training, Professor Richard Silberstein spent four decades as a working neuroscientist at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. He was the Chairman of the Physics Department, founder of the Brain Sciences Institute, and the inventor of a brain imaging method (Steady State Topography) that’s now used to study everything from memory to ADHD. The author of more than 110 peer-reviewed published scientific papers, he is, by temperament and profession, a scientist and skeptic.

Those credentials — he’s literally among the world’s top brain scientists — is what makes his new book, Stranger and Stranger: The Neuroscience of How Mind and Cosmos Communicate (Park Street Press, out this October) so astonishing and life-changing.

He started out trying to make sense of one well-known stubborn anomaly, precognition (seeing the future), and ended up going down the rabbit hole that his book lays out in astonishing detail.

In the first half of the book, Richard takes us on a tour of the tens of thousands of replicated, solid, usually peer-reviewed science that suggests the existence of something parapsychologists call psi. They include:

— The Ganzfeld telepathy protocol, where a meta-analysis of 108 studies published between 1987 and 2010 produced odds against chance of roughly one in ten quadrillion that such a thing could be possible, yet it keeps getting reaffirmed over and over again.
— He digs into quantum random number generators that are influenced by human thought, the double-slit experiments run by Dean Radin’s team at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and a body of presentiment studies in which people’s skin conductance rises a few seconds before a disturbing image appears on a screen, and, confounding all expectations and “rational” explanations, before the computer has even selected it.
— He revisits the CIA’s infamous remote viewing program (and its considerable and well-documented successes) and the 1995 evaluation in which statistician Jessica Utts and professional skeptic Ray Hyman, asked to assess the same data, ended up largely in agreement.

Silberstein’s own research also appears in the book and its mind-boggling. In 2024 he and a colleague published a study of identical twins placed in separate rooms, sensorily isolated from each other, as one viewed a series of random images while the other stared at a blank screen.

Changes in the “receiver” twin’s brain lined up with the moments the “sender” saw a “meaningful” picture and happened at a frequency that should have been four times in a hundred million trials. Even more fascinating, when these twins were, essentially, telepathically connected hroughout the experiment, the receiving twins reported feeling nothing at all. Whatever was going on, it was happening well below the threshold of human awareness.

It’s that observation that’s at the heart of Richard’s book’s most interesting argument, one that has massive implications for humanity, religion, politics, and science.

Silberstein proposes that our brains don’t so much “create” consciousness as connect to some vast universal source that our brains then filter. Evolution, he argues, built our nervous systems to prioritize necessities like food, sex, and survival, while it built elaborate inhibitory circuits to suppress everything else the universe is giving us access to but that our brains consider “not necessary.”

Recent studies he cites include patients with left frontal lobe damage, showing that they can affect random number generators in ways “normal” people can’t. Interestingly, when that same region of the brain is temporarily quieted by transcranial magnetic stimulation, normies can also influence random number generators.

Turn off the brain’s “gatekeeper,” in other words, and you let both creativity and the intelligence and experience of the universe, psi, leak through.

And then the book gets even stranger, as the title promises.

Silberstein shares the details of Michael Levin’s work at Tufts showing that bioelectric fields, not just genes, direct how animal (and, presumably, plant) bodies develop, including the now-famous tadpole grown with a working eye on its flank because of bioelectric stimulation.

He tells the stories of the heart transplant recipients who reported acquiring their donors’ tastes, from food to motorcycles.

He engages seriously, and with genuine intellectual courage, with Ian Stevenson’s decades of case files on children who describe past lives in detail.

And he posits that probable futures exists in a nested hierarchy of what he calls Temporal Causal Levels, shaped by consciousness itself through what he terms retrocausal loops.

While the science is amazing, the possible implications for society and politics are equally astonishing. Studies done by hardcore scientists working under the umbrella of the Global Consciousness Project found that when a certain threshold of people in a community regularly meditate, the crime rate and rate of general violence drops.

But what about the opposite? What happens when billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg use their social media platform algorighms to feed hate, bigotry, fear, and rage directly into people’s minds? Whether they’re doing it to “increase engagement” to crank up time-spent-scrolling and advertisement exposure to make more billions, or to influence politics and political perspectives, the result could well be the same.

He argues that these billionaires have built a global machine for generating exactly the kind of massed, focused, hostile intent that his science finds actually affects the physical world around us as well as the minds of those around us.

Citing Peter Turchin’s work on Cleodynamics that charts cycles of political disintegration, Richard closes his book by calling for coordinated, large-scale group meditations focused on making a better and more peaceful world for us all.

This book will both astonish you and change how you view much of what we’re confronting today, from our psychology to our religion to our politics. Don’t miss it!

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Part One/Week One. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 1 through 7)

When Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward came out in 1888, nobody expected much of it. Bellamy was a mild, sickly newspaperman from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, and he’d written an utopian romance about a Bostonian who sleeps for a century. But Jules Verne had been writing futuristic fiction for most of the 19th century, and the public more than warmed up to Bellamy’s book.

Within a decade after its first publication (it’s still in print) it had sold nearly a million copies in the United States and England, been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian, Arabic, and Bulgarian among other languages, and become the third best-selling American book of the entire nineteenth century, trailing only Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.

It also inspired the modern progressive movement: more than 160 “Nationalist Clubs” sprang up across the country to turn the book’s vision of a possible American future into political reality. Its ideas inspired the Populist Party platform of 1892, energized the early Socialist Party, and were foundational to the Progressive Era’s fights over public ownership of utilities and railroads, and eventually FDR’s New Deal.

Bernie Sanders’ hero Eugene Debs, socialist leader Norman Thomas, and a generation of reformers said publicly that this was the book that first opened their eyes to the possibility of a new and progressive America. In 1935, when a panel of scholars was asked to name the most influential books published since 1885, Looking Backward came in second, behind only Marx’s Das Kapital.

This novel, my book club book for September, about what life could be in the year 2000 in America hit 1888 like a thunderclap that resonated for, literally, more than a century.

The book’s plot device is simple. Julian West is a rich young Bostonian born in 1857, living comfortably on inherited money, rendering, as he puts it, “no sort of service in return.” He’s engaged to Edith Bartlett, and the only cloud on his horizon is that the strikes of the 1880s keep delaying the construction of his new house.

West suffers from insomnia and has a Mesmerist — hypnosis was a huge fad in Europe and America during that era, as I’ve written in detail in my book Walking Your Blues Away — put him to sleep in a sealed underground chamber beneath his home.

He goes under on the night of May 30, 1887 but doesn’t wake up until September 10, 2000, in the house of Dr. Leete, a retired physician who has been digging a laboratory foundation in his garden and discovered the still-sealed vault. West had slept 113 years, three months, and eleven days.

Before any of that happens, though, Bellamy gives us the single most quoted passage in the book, West’s description of the society he left behind:

“I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents.”

The people on top, West admits, felt sympathy for the people in the harness, “especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road.” But it was a distant form of sympathy, and it came bundled with a “singular hallucination” that they “were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay.”

Anyone who’s watched one of today’s pampered billionaires explain why he deserves his wealth and power will recognize the type.

Once West accepts where (and when) he is, he asks Dr. Leete the obvious question: What happened to the labor question that had been tearing apart the 1880s with strikes and the murdering of union leaders, what he called “the Sphinx’s riddle of the nineteenth century.”

Leete’s answer about how America works in the year 2000 is the heart of the book, and it’s an extraordinary vision that goes well beyond even Marx’s imaginings. There was no revolution. The trusts and monopolies that terrified Americans in the 1880s simply kept consolidating until it became obvious to both America’s voters and politicians that industry organized on a national scale was more efficient than industry scattered among thousands of competing firms.

The only question left was who should own the monopolies:

“The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had then organized for political purposes.”

Bellamy has Leete put it even more sharply. It was finally understood:

“[T]hat no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles.”

When West objects that this is a frightening extension of government power, Leete turns it around. Nineteenth century governments seized men by the hundreds of thousands and sent them off to die in wars, he says, and nobody called that an overreach:

“And, in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies? Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and nakedness?”

The mechanism for this transformation of the fundamentals of our economy is what Bellamy calls the industrial army. Every citizen serves (works) from age 21 to 45, then retires. Unlike Marx’s vision, nobody is assigned a job: people choose their own work according to aptitude, and the administration equalizes the attractiveness of different trades by adjusting hours.

Miners gets short hours, pleasant work gets longer ones, and if a job is so awful nobody will volunteer even at ten minutes a day, “it would remain undone.” Leete adds a line that could come from any progressive politician today:

“The nation does not maim and slaughter its workmen by thousands, as did the private capitalists and corporations of your day.”

That’s where the first quarter of the book leaves us, with West still asking

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Thom Hartmann talked about his book, Who Killed the American Dream, as well as Unequal Protection, which inspired it.

We welcomed a wide range of members to the live chat, and several asked Thom questions over the hour. Thank you to all who joined Thom and moderator Nigel today.

The full hour is available to you, whether or not you are a subscriber, as this is the first live session.

September Book of the Month

Looking Backward is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.

Each Sunday in September, Thom will post a summary of parts of the book, and paid subscribers can comment on their thoughts.

To be able to comment on posts during the month, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.

Join the Book Club Today!

On the last Sunday of the month, September 27, we will hold a live session on Substack, where you can ask Thom your questions and chat with other book club members. The live session starts at Noon ET / 9 am PT.

Just Want the Book Club and Nothing Else?

Visit this link: https://hartmannreport.com/account and set your preferences to the sections you would like to receive by email. You will need to be signed in.

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In a few hours we’ll meet here on Hartmann Report to discuss this book; next month there will be a new book, Looking Forward by Edward Bellamy. Here’s the final part of the last chapter of Who Stole the American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told.

Two Possible Futures

The two possible futures we face today aren’t just about democracy or corporate power in the abstract. They represent starkly different visions of America: will we become more like FDR’s ideal, or will we continue down today’s road to oligarchic neo-feudalism like Russia and Hungary did?

Future One: Oligarchy Triumphant

In this possible future, the America of We the People fails. The billionaire oligarchs complete their capture of what’s left of our democracy, corporate constitutional rights remain the law of the land, and wealth concentration accelerates until a handful of trillionaires own most of our politicians as well as everything else worth owning.

The middle class shrinks down to around 10 or 20 percent of us as the American economy comes to resemble the Victorian England that Charles Dickens wrote about in almost every one of his many books. Most Americans become permanent renters, never owning homes, never building wealth, and never achieving anything close to financial security. We work multiple jobs for oligarchs and corporations that face no democratic accountability, under conditions that grow steadily worse, for wages and benefits that somehow never keep pace with costs.

Healthcare remains unaffordable, education is financed by debt, and housing fully becomes a speculative playground for private equity and foreign investors. Climate change accelerates as fossil fuel corporations use their constitutional rights to block every attempt at regulation or the construction of alternative energy systems.

Democracy becomes nothing more than theater, like in most of the other oligarchies and tyrannies across the planet. Elections are held, but oligarchs fund all of the viable candidates and use their media and “free speech” to destroy any politicians who dare try challenge the system. The illusion of choice masks total corporate and billionaire control of our society and our governments, while the Constitution is twisted by a corrupt Supreme Court into a vestigial document that only protects their patrons and allies.

If this current trend continues and those of us who remember America before Reagan’s corporate constitutional rights Revolution die out, the American Dream becomes a mere historical curiosity, a quaint, idealized past that young people skeptically read about in history books, a brief shining—but improbable—moment between the old aristocracies of Europe and the new oligarchies of the twenty-first century.

You could call it a new form of feudalism decorated with smartphones and compliant media, and it’s where we’re headed if we do nothing.

Future Two: Democracy Restored

In this future, democracy and the middle class win. The movement to end corporate constitutional rights reaches its tipping point and the Twenty-Eighth (or Twenty-Ninth) Amendment passes, explicitly stating that constitutional rights belong only to human beings.

With corporate constitutional rights stripped away, democracy can function again without corrupt Republican justices on the Supreme Court constantly constraining it. Congress is once again free to pass laws regulating corporate behavior without confronting endless constitutional litigation. States again revoke the charters of corporations that harm the public interest, corrupt executives once again go to prison, and local communities can again care for their people with revenues from taxing the morbidly rich.

Unions will recover and rebuild America as workers regain their bargaining power and union busting is outlawed. Wages rise to match productivity and the cost of living. And the fifty-plus trillion dollars that was stolen by the Reagan Revolution begins flowing back toward the working families whose labor created it in the first place.

Healthcare becomes a right like in every other advanced democracy in the world and ceases to be just another corporate profit center. Higher education becomes affordable again, and our public schools are rebuilt like Eisenhower did back in the day. Housing becomes a human need to be met, and exploiting it as a speculative commodity is outlawed or taxed into nonexistence. Climate change is addressed because fossil fuel corporations can no longer use their “free speech rights” to buy politicians and block regulation.

The American Dream is, in other words, reborn. Not the old dream of the 1950s, with its racial and gender exclusions and limitations, but a new dream for a new century. A dream where hard work is consistently rewarded, where every family can afford a home regardless of where or to whom they were born, where sickness doesn’t bankrupt people, where education opens doors instead of creating debt prisons, and where each generation once again does better than the last.

This is the America we could bring about, and it all begins by exposing Davis’s toxic headnote and using the public outrage to end corporate constitutional rights.

The Story They Could Tell

The newspapers and editorialists of the 2030s could write that in the 2020s people began to wake up.

They could chronicle how researchers dug through dusty law libraries and found the evidence of Davis’s and Field’s crime, revealed that the infamous headnote was a fraud and the oft-quoted Santa Clara decision never said what everyone thought it said. They could explain how, for 140 years, American democracy had been undermined by a lie, and the American Dream had been stolen by corporate oligarchs.

Activists organized. The Move to Amend Movement spread from community to community, educating millions. Towns such as Spokane, Lafayette, and hundreds of others passed ordinances rejecting corporate constitutional rights. States passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment.

The stories would document how the oligarchs fought back with everything they had, spending billions on propaganda while purchasing politicians, judges, and airtime. How they used every constitutional right they’d fraudulently acquired to prevent their own disempowerment.

But the people persisted.

Town by town, state by state, year by year, we educated neighbors. We ran for office, organized, and voted. We built a movement that finally broke through.

And in 2030, after decades of organizing, we passed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, declaring that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.

As in 1865 in the South and 1933 nationwide, a third oligarchic era ended in America, and a new democratic age was kicked off. Corporate charters were revoked for corporations that harmed the public interest, monopolies were broken up, and wealth was redistributed through a return to rational individual and corporate taxation. Workers rebuilt unions, and communities regained control of their futures.

The American Dream, they’ll write, was reborn.

It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t quick. And it certainly wasn’t easy. But it happened because ordinary people refused to accept rule by the morbidly rich—founded on the lie of corporate constitutional rights—as inevitable. Because we understood that the American Dream wasn’t some nostalgic fantasy but a real achievement that had been stolen from us and our children, and we chose, instead of going along any more, to rise up and take it back.

Or the Story, If We Fail

Historians in the 2030s could also write a different story, explaining how in the early twenty-first century the climate catastrophe accelerated, killing millions and creating caravans of climate refugees. The billionaires and tech bro oligarchs tightened their grip on our lives and our news. As a result, what was left of our democracy after Trump’s gilded presidency collapsed under the burden of corporate money and media manipulation. The American Dream became merely a bitter memory.

Some people, they’ll tell us, saw what was happening. Researchers found the evidence of the 1886 fraud, activists tried to organize resistance, and a few communities even passed ordinances. A handful of states called for a constitutional amendment to reverse Davis’s fraud.

But most Americans—struggling just to pay the rent and childcare bills—were too busy, too distracted, too exhausted, or too cynical to care. They knew the system was rigged; they just didn’t believe they could change it, so they didn’t even try.

As a result, the oligarchs won by default. Democracy died with a shrug, a footnote in a back section of the New York Times.

In this scenario, by 2050 America becomes a brutal, iron-fisted tyranny in fact as well as function. By 2075, even the pretense of democracy is abandoned to corrupt, strongman government based on the Russian and Hungarian system. The old US Constitution had become an anachronism, a museum piece from a bygone era when people naively believed in self-governance and dreamed of economic security for all.

The crime that started in 1886 and was kicked into high gear with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was never punished, the theft of constitutional rights never reversed, and the American Dream never restored.

The oligarchs won.

Climate collapse made much of the Earth uninhabitable. Billions died. Civilization fragmented. The survivors lived in a world of scarcity, surveillance, and oligarchic control. The historians of 2090, if any exist, would look back at the early twenty-first century as the last moment when change was possible, when people could have acted but failed to.

When the American Dream could have been saved but wasn’t.

Which Story Gets Told?

America’s future now depends on what you do.

Will you read this book and forget it? Or will you act?

Will you share this story? Will you join Move to Amend, Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen, or a similar organization dedicated to fighting corporate constitutional rights? Will you attend your local city council meetings and demand your community reject corporate constitutional rights? Will you organize your friends and neighbors? Will you vote for candidates who support the amendment? Will you run for office yourself?

Will you talk to your family about this over dinner? Will you explain it to your friends and acquaintances on social media? Will you help us make it impossible for people to plead ignorance?

Will you persist when it seems hopeless? Will you keep fighting when the oligarchs push back? Will you refuse to give up?

What you do today determines the history they’ll write tomorrow.

A Final Word

Thomas Jefferson knew this day would come. In 1816, he wrote: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

We didn’t crush it in its birth but instead let it grow for two centuries. Now it’s crushing us.

But it’s not too late.

This bizarre, artificial aristocracy of moneyed corporations and their billionaire oligarchs can still be defeated. The morbidly rich can still be stopped, and democracy can still be reclaimed, restoring the American Dream.

The greatest legal crime in American history was committed in 1886. We’re going to solve it.

We’re going to restore the American Dream.

Join us.

Let us reclaim America’s destiny, as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. . . . ​The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

Your Invitation

The first live session for members of Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club is on Sunday.

Join Thom Hartmann in a live session on Substack and share your thoughts on his latest book, Who Killed the American Dream.

Time and Place

Day: Sunday, August 30
Time: Noon ET / 9am PT
Place: The Hartmann Report Substack and in the Substack app

How it Works

Thom Hartmann will be live to talk about the book and take your questions.

You can ask questions in the chat and, if you like, can be called into the ‘room’ where you will need your video and audio on.

To use chat or to be called into the room, you need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.

Nigel Peacock will be your moderator.

Thom will also announce the September Book of the Month.

To join in, subscribe now

Join the Book Club

This is the first live session for the book club using Substack, so we’ll all be learning how it works. Should be fun!

See you there!

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Epilogue: What History Will Say About Us

History teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government that typically either collapse from their own internal rot—as happened here in 1929 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties—or get overthrown by their own people, as happened in the 1860s when the fascist system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War.

But when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny, and usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than twenty years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Before that tipping point is reached, most people think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid forty years. They own the media, have captured the courts, and bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to tyranny.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare to—or have the power to—constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time, and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every year that corporate constitutional rights remain in place, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. Oligarchies either fall or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

In 2036, it will be 150 years since Davis wrote that corrupt Santa Clara headnote.

What will America look like?

Will we still be the world’s richest democracy, and return to being a nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” and government should work first and foremost for We the People?

Or will we continue the Trump-blazed path of being a nation primarily serving a billionaire president, thirteen billionaires in his cabinet, billionaire media owners, and tech bro billionaires addicting our children to rage for their own profit?

The Dream That Was Stolen

In 1944, as millions of Americans fought fascism overseas, Franklin Roosevelt delivered one of his most important State of the Union addresses. He was too ill to travel to the Capitol building, so he spoke from the White House, his voice carried over this newfangled thing called radio into living rooms across America.

While he referenced the war effort in this speech, the man who’d rescued America from the Republican Great Depression leaned heavily on his proposal—what he called a Second Bill of Rights—to make America into what Jefferson called “a more perfect union.” Its focus was a new set of constitutional rights that would guarantee the American Dream to every citizen.

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact,” Roosevelt said, “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights laid out, as mentioned earlier, the rights to a job that pays well, small businesses to be free from unfair competition by monopolies, housing for all Americans, healthcare for all, and free college.

“All of these rights spell security,” FDR said. “And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

FDR died shortly after that speech, on April 12, 1945, but over the next thirty-five years we came close to achieving that dream.

By 1980, two-thirds of Americans lived it. We had jobs that paid enough to support a family, we could afford to buy a home in our 20s, and healthcare didn’t bankrupt us. We attended college without crushing debt, and for most of us, our retirement was secure. Ever since 1933, each generation had done better than the one before it.

Then Reagan was elected and—like Trump did with Project 2025—implemented the Heritage Foundation’s 1,093-page 1980 “Mandate for Leadership,” telling the oligarchs at the US Chamber of Commerce they should seize control of the media, the courts, America’s universities, and public opinion.

While the Mandate’s two thousand–plus recommendations didn’t specifically cite Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo or Davis’s notorious headnote, it didn’t have to: corporate constitutional rights were the obvious tool to accomplish most goals of the Foundation’s billionaire founders and funders.

Reagan, the GOP, and the biggest businesses in America used corporate First Amendment rights to buy elections and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. They used corporate property rights to battle every regulation that protected workers, consumers, and communities. They used corporate due process rights to block accountability for corporate crimes.

They crushed the unions that gave workers bargaining power, starting with Reagan’s attack on the air traffic controllers’ PATCO. They wrote the trade deals that would ship millions of good manufacturing jobs overseas. They turned healthcare and health insurance from servants of the middle class into raw profit centers. They transformed housing from a human need into a speculative commodity and loaded young people with debt for education that used to be free.

And they transferred over fifty trillion dollars from the homes and wallets and retirement accounts of working Americans to their own money bins.

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights was never passed, but the dream it represented was real for the generations that watched and lived his expansion of democracy and an economy that increasingly worked for all.

But then Reagan and his “conservative” buddies used Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote to kill even a hope for FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.

See you next weekend for the last half of the Epilogue and our online conversation!

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Welcome to Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club, one of the perks of your subscription to the Hartmann Report. We’ll be meeting live on the last Sunday of every month at noon ET, 9 am PT. One book a month.

And the timing couldn’t be better.

On July 30th, a federal appeals court gave Arkansas the green light to start arresting librarians. Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin enthusiastically praised the neo-Nazi-style book-banning ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.”

Act 372 makes it a crime to hand a minor any “harmful item,” is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine, and it lets city and county rightwing politicians decide what books, newspapers, and magazines are “harmful.”

And it doesn’t name or define books, so librarians are stuck guessing what some rightwinger is going to be offended by. Caution, of course, will be the word of the day, and kids will be the ones suffering.

PEN America counted 6,870 rightwing book bans in just one single school year, 2025, across 23 states. The American Library Association identified 4,235 titles challenged by these neo-Nazis in 2025: 92% of those challenges came from hardcore rightwing pressure groups and hard-right politicians.

Under 3% of the calls to ban books came from an actual parent worried about an actual kid.

PEN’s newest report found bans on nonfiction more than doubled this year, with over 1,100 history books, biographies, and memoirs pulled off shelves. They’re not chasing Lady Chatterly’s Lover; they’re going after books that warn about what’s happening right now in this country. Books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.

When I was a kid in Lansing, the library was just a few miles from our house and there was also a great library in my school. While librarians were happy to make recommendations and check me out, nobody ever questioned what I took home or asked my parents to sign off.

Upper- and middle-class kids will be able to get around these bans by simply buying their own books, but rural, Black, and lower-income children will be hit hard as our libraries become more and more anodyne. Researchers went through 20 years of federal time-use data covering 236,000 Americans and found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped from 28% to 16% over just the past 20 years.

So let’s do something about it together.

Some months will be my books, and on others I’ll try to bring the author on and you’ll get to talk directly with them. Some months we’ll take on something written 50 or 150 years ago, other times brand new releases, and every book we discuss will have one thing in common: it made somebody powerful uncomfortable.

Our first book is my most recent one, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, which came out July 7th. We’ll meet to discuss it in 2 weeks, on the morning of Sunday, August 30th.

In 1886 — contrary to what many lawyers learned in law school — the Supreme Court did not rule that corporations are people. The justices ducked the question entirely. But the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president and Very Wealthy Guy named J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote a headnote saying they had.

That one sentence — which had no legal stature — became the foundation for American corporate power in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, continued straight through to Citizens United, and legalized the billions that the morbidly rich are right now showering on their toady politicians.

Get the book however you like. Your free local library probably has it or can order it, and your local independent bookstore will order it happily. Or use Powells.com, our local bookstore here in Portland, which is a real gem, unionized, and has a huge inventory (it’s literally an entire city block and 4 stories high, all filled with books!).

They’re banning books because books have been foundational to positive political change from the beginning of our republic to today. So let’s read the dangerous ones together, and discuss them in a room they can’t close.

I’ll see you in the chat. Let’s all be troublemakers together. Here’s an excerpt from:

Chapter 11: The Deflection Playbook

Culture War as a Substitute for Economic Reform

The most sophisticated deflection program that today’s oligarchs are using to conceal their corporate theft of human rights is their so-called culture war itself.

“Woke” has become their all-purpose slur. They slap it on civil rights advocacy, diversity initiatives, LGBTQ equality, labor activism, honest history, and even environmental protection.

The brilliance of this kind of “anti-woke” propaganda is that it helps politicians and the people who design their political ads create what looks like a widespread voter backlash while never having to talk about the real issues that actually affect average Americans like taxes, wages, monopolies, or healthcare.

Instead of debating whether hedge funds should be allowed to buy up single-family homes (as is happening today, driving our housing crisis), the nation is forced to fight over whether schools should have books on the shelves that talk about about diverse families or the difficulties Black people have faced throughout American history.

Attacks like these on America’s schools, libraries, and public institutions like this work well for both the oligarchs and their predatory corporations. When America’s oligarchs can convince people that schools are “indoctrinating” or “mutilating” their children, that libraries are “grooming” them, and that universities are “brainwashing” them, they succeed in delegitimize the very institutions that traditionally have taught people to question oligarchic power.

The goal of these memes and the billionaire-owned rightwing media’s constant flood of moral-outrage stories isn’t really to protect children or preserve “family values.” Instead, it’s done explicitly to prevent any sort of economic solidarity from forming through keeping people battling each other over phony issues of “cultural identity.”

“Fraud” Narratives That Justify Voter Suppression

The deflection playbook being run by America’s oligarchs even extends to our democracy itself.

When elections are framed as inherently fraudulent—when Republicans claim “illegal votes” explain every Republican loss—it gets a whole heck of a lot easier to justify restrictive voting rules that drive down turnout. Voter ID requirements disproportionately affect poor voters, while the GOP has been on a fifty-year voter roll–purging binge going back to the days of William Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye that mostly targets communities of color.

Reporter Greg Palast reports that Black people are 400 percent more likely to have their ballots thrown out than white people; months before the 2000 election in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush had around ninety thousand Black people purged from that state’s voting rolls, giving room for his brother George to win the state by 537 votes.

Using data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, Palast discovered that voter suppression led to 14.1 million voters having their ballots disqualified in the 2024 election that Trump “won” by a margin of only two million votes.

Around five million voters were purged from voter rolls without credible justification in the months leading up to the election, and another two million mail-in ballots were challenged by Republican “poll monitors” and then disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g., postage due). Another roughly eight hundred thousand ballots were disqualified or rejected for other, non-credible reasons, and over 3.24 million new registrations were rejected in 2024 without credible evidence.

“Fraud” also supposedly justifies reducing polling places in urban areas and doing away with drop boxes, while also limiting early voting and vote by mail.

The actual evidence of voter fraud in America is vanishingly small, as study after study has found that fraudulent voting is extremely rare and there’s not a single election in our lifetimes that’s been flipped because of it. But evidence isn’t the point for the oligarchs. The goal is to make voting itself suspect, to thus create a pretext for rules that make it harder and harder for working-class people and minorities to participate in our democracy.

Corporations support these policies because if working-class people voted in proportion to their numbers—if they weren’t suppressed and gerrymandered and discouraged—they’d almost certainly vote for economic policies that threaten oligarchic power. As we saw in New York City in 2005, they’d vote to tax wealth, strengthen unions, regulate corporations, and rebuild the social contract.

War, the Ultimate Deflection

In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge to Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam War and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little three-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.

Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004:

I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999. . . . ​One of the things [Bush] said to me is: “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait), and he wasted it. . . . ​If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.

The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to be seen as a commander--in-chief when our guy Osama bin Laden—who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan—engineered an attack on New York and DC.

The crime was planned in Germany and Florida. On 9/11 bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan: “CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorists’ attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the US war on terror in Afghanistan.” When the Obama administration finally caught and killed bin Laden, he was again in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.

But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run al-Qaeda training camps there, unrelated to 9/11, but they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.

Trump reprised the strategy in 2025, becoming the first American president to bomb seven different countries in one year prior to his 2026 invasion of Venezuela and bombing of Iran. Keep them occupied with the external enemy, and they’ll fail to notice who’s draining their bank accounts and stealing their wages.

Breaking the Spell

Every element of this oligarch’s deflection playbook serves a single purpose: preventing working-class solidarity.

The oligarchs know that they’re outnumbered and that if working people across racial, religious, and cultural lines ever united around their shared economic interests, oligarch power would crumble. The deflection playbook was created and is maintained to make sure that never happens.

White workers are taught to resent Black workers. Native-born workers are taught to fear immigrant workers. Rural workers are taught to despise urban workers. Christian workers are taught to distrust Muslim workers. Straight workers are taught to feel threatened by LGBTQ workers.

All of us are taught by oligarch media to blame each other for the declining American Dream, while never, ever mentioning the actual oligarchs and their corporations who actually killed it.

Corporate constitutional rights gave the oligarchs the legal weapons they needed to destroy unions, slash taxes, offshore jobs, and capture control of our government. The deflection playbook and Reagan’s ending the Fairness Doctrine gave them the necessary propaganda tools to prevent working-class people from ever launching a democratic response.

While the constitutional amendment we need to pass will strip corporations of their legal weapons, we also need to strip the oligarchs of these propaganda weapons.

That means calling out and naming these types of deflections when we see them.

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Chapter 10: The Cover-Up

How They Pinned the Crime on Scapegoats

Recently, an aficionado of Fox “News” called into my radio program to say that he was “sick and tired of being ripped off by these Somali [Black] welfare cheats.”

I asked him if he realized that from an average taxpayer’s point of view, the amount of federal tax dollars that goes to everyday safety-net programs like SNAP or basic welfare “is about $324 per taxpayer, but direct subsidies and special tax breaks that favor big businesses and industries cost each taxpayer thousands of dollars per year.”

He grunted, as if he didn’t believe me, and hung up the phone. These guys are truly well indoctrinated, which raises the question: how and why did that happen?

Reagan and the oligarchs who funded him were faced with a problem of growing discontent among “the rabble.”

The billionaires and giant corporations had largely accomplished their initial goals by the end of Reagan’s first term, and by Trump’s second, had almost completely subdued the middle class. They’d crushed unions, slashed their own taxes to almost nothing (both personal and corporate), and shipped millions of good-paying jobs overseas to low-wage countries.

They’d turned healthcare from a nonprofit public good (by law in most states) into a $5 trillion-a-year profit center, and hedge funds, big banks, and foreign investors had transformed single-family housing into a virtual casino where the house—themselves—always won. They’d successfully transferred over fifty trillion dollars from working Americans into their own money bins in fewer than forty years.

As planned, the American Dream was dying before average people’s eyes at the same time the oligarchs had become richer than any kings or emperors or pharaohs in world history. Wages stagnated while productivity—and, thus, profits—soared. Young people couldn’t afford to buy their first homes. Medical debt made a fortune for the industry but bankrupted over a half million families every year. Because of all this, the middle class had shrunk from 66 percent to 43 percent in a mere four decades.

This created the problem for oligarch-owned Republican politicians: the result of all this was that people were justifiably angry—seriously pissed off. It was the kind of anger that, throughout history, has toppled oligarchies, brought down governments, and forced the rewriting of constitutions. America had become a boiling pot, and the oligarchs were starting to feel the heat.

So, they did what oligarchs have always done from the days of the Caesars to the Confederacy: they deflected that anger.

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Not toward themselves, of course, even though they were the ones actually responsible for the theft of the American Dream. Not toward the corporations that were using ill-gotten constitutional rights to crush workers and capture control of most of our government. And not toward the billionaires whose assets exploded while everyone else’s shrank.

Instead, they deflected the working class’s anger downward, toward the very, very convenient people at the bottom of the ladder, the people with even less power than the tens of millions of struggling workers.

It was a massive cover-up of the theft of human rights, a very specific plan for blaming the victims instead of the perpetrators.

Republicans created, in other words, scapegoats.

Turning Poverty into a Moral Failure

The first move in the corporate oligarchs’ cover-up playbook was to use their political platforms and captured media to make poverty shameful and government help something that everybody should become suspicious of.

Reagan didn’t invent racism or disdain for the poor, of course, but he weaponized both with a fictional character: the “welfare queen.” In speech after speech all across the country and in TV appearances, the Gipper described a woman in Chicago who supposedly had “eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards,” and collected “over $150,000” every year in government benefits. She drove a “big” Cadillac, then a status symbol in the Black community. She was, Reagan told us, living large off us sucker average working-class taxpayers.

The story was almost entirely fabricated. But for Reagan’s purposes, it didn’t need to be true: it only needed to be useful. “Fraud” became the GOP’s favorite word for everything from suppressing the vote to cutting benefits to blaming the death of the middle class on poor and Black people.

And it was devastatingly useful. That single story, told over and over again for eight years, transformed America’s social safety net—so carefully constructed from the New Deal to the Great Society that had lifted millions out of poverty—from a source of security for struggling families into a “scam” that “cheaters” exploited. This victim blaming made poverty a character flaw rather than a product of the GOP’s new system of low wages, union busting, expensive college, unpredictable medical costs, and soaring housing prices.

The “personal responsibility” narrative followed this vilification of poor people as naturally as leaves sprouting in the spring. If poverty was a moral failure, if struggling families were in the straits they found themselves because of “bad choices,” then, Republicans and their conservative media told us, cutting programs that help them isn’t cruelty, it’s tough love. It’s actually doing them a favor by incentivizing better behavior.

I remember how Rush Limbaugh used to tell this joke (one of his favorites when he wasn’t blaming women for the economic problems of white men): “What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he won’t get up! Hahahaha!”

Notice what this narrative doesn’t mention: stagnant wages, union busting, exploding healthcare and education costs, skyrocketing housing prices, offshored jobs, or any of the actual causes of economic insecurity brought to us by the Reagan Revolution, powered by corporate constitutional rights based on Davis’s headnote. It instead keeps working-class anger focused on other working-class people—the ones getting “handouts”—while the oligarchs quietly pocket another trillion dollars.

It was the old story of the fat-cat corporate CEO sitting at a table with two working men, each with a plate before him. The CEO has a huge pile of cookies, and each of the two workers has a single cookie on his plate. The CEO points to one of them and says to the other, “Look out, he wants your cookie!”

The Southern Strategy and “Law and Order”

That well-known cookie meme also has a variation, where one worker is Black and the other is white. The CEO points at the Black worker and tells the white worker the Black guy wants to steal his cookie.

Reagan’s welfare queen imagery wasn’t racially neutral by a long shot. Everyone knew who Reagan was describing, just like when he’d ask people if they got angry when a “young buck” was in front of them in the supermarket line “buying steak with food stamps while all you can afford is hamburger.”

The cover-up and deflection playbook has always had a racial dimension, but after the legal and political successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, explicit racism became politically toxic.

So Republican strategists developed what Nixon called his Southern Strategy, which Reagan cheerfully adopted in his first speech after his nomination in 1980. It was about “states’ rights” near the scene of the Mississippi Burning murder of three civil rights workers.

It was elegant in its simplicity, a deliberate shift from explicit racism to barely coded language that activated the same resentments while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability that could be used with great indignation in media appearances when Republicans were accused of playing the race card.

Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist who managed George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign and created the infamous Willie Horton ad, explained it with unusual candor in a 1981 interview: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’—that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

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How This Relates to Today:

In this chapter excerpt we see how the GOP, having basically nothing to offer the average American, has turned to racism and bigotry to fuel their campaigns to get and hold political power.

This strategy, making use of the reality — well known to the Republicans on the Supreme Court — that the vast majority of the morbidly rich are so self-obsessed that they’ll sacrifice our democracy for a tax cut, has been at the core of Republican campaigns since Nixon rolled out his “Law and Order” program to try to disrupt both the anti-war and Civil Rights movements.

Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Here’s today’s example, posted last night to Trump’s Nazi-infested social media network. Because they’re entirely devoted to making themselves and their billionaire buddies (13 of them in Trump’s cabinet) richer and screwing working class people to do so, their entire message is: “See his brown skin? See her burka? See how different they are from us white ‘Christian’ people?”

Let’s continue the conversation next week…